Session Notes

Opening Question

For Dewey, seeing with a capital S, the act of participating artistically in the world, happens between the living creature and its environment, in the in-between of the two, where the imagination is the instrument that works that space. But for Merleau-Ponty, the action seems to happen in the flesh, in a body that is simultaneously the seer and the thing being seen. It is woven into the fabric of the visible world. Even if you don’t have eyeballs, the depth there isn’t created in the transaction, it’s already there. In a sense, and painting discloses that somehow. So if we’ve moved the site of seeing from between the creature and the environment, what happens to our imagination?

We began by noting how different Merleau-Ponty’s project feels from Dewey’s, while arriving at something deeply adjacent. Where Dewey derives from the texture of lived experience, Merleau-Ponty works through the technicality of one particular sensory modality, drilling into what sight actually is, as a way of excavating perception as a whole. Both, though, are making the same fundamental claim: that art discloses something about reality that ordinary, conceptually-enframed perception misses. Merleau-Ponty simply takes us deeper into the mechanism. He is not idealist, we agreed on that. He is not saying the world is a projection or a dream. He is saying that the world as it has any meaning at all, including the very concept of an object, is continuously brought forth in the act of experiencing. There is no experience without a subject, and so the world is neither just out there nor just in here. It is always relational, always in process. One of us put it well: he’s giving us the metaphysics of what Dewey was describing.

The rainbow came up as an example, and it landed. When we look at one in America, we see seven bands, ROYGBIV, because that is what we have been taught to see. Russians have two words for blue and see eight. The undifferentiated wavelengths are the same. What we see, the bands themselves, the colors as discrete things, is brought forth through the culturally shaped body encountering the world. This is not relativism, it is not the claim that nothing is there. It is that the meaning, the thatness of the thing, is inseparable from the encounter. Merleau-Ponty calls it bringing forth, and we recognized this as what contemporary cognitive science names autopoiesis: life as the self-creating, self-bringing act. The wine-dark sea of Homer became a refrain through the session, a kind of shorthand for the ways of seeing that our particular structure of consciousness has foreclosed. What did the ancient Greeks actually see when they looked at the sea and called it the color of wine? We found ourselves genuinely wanting to know, and somewhat bereft that we couldn’t.

Part of what made this feel so pressing was a passage we kept returning to, one that locates the action of seeing with unusual precision. A human body is present, Merleau-Ponty writes, when between the seer and the visible, between touching and the touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident calls the body. Once this strange system of exchange is given, we find before us all the problems of painting. The locus of seeing, in other words, is not a point behind the eyes. It is the crossover itself, a fold within the body where the seer catches itself being seen, where the touching hand becomes the hand that is touched. The body is not a camera pointed at the world. It is the site where world and flesh curve back into each other. And once you have that, he is saying, you have all the problems of painting, because painting is the attempt to make that folding visible.

The conversation then turned toward the question of why painting specifically. Merleau-Ponty’s positioning of painting above other art forms provoked some early skepticism, but we came to understand his claim more carefully. Music, he says, is too far on the hither side of the designatable, its ebb and flow and growth can gesture toward structures of being but cannot make a concrete argument about the world. Writing and philosophy, at the other extreme, are already conceptualized, already opinionated, weighted with the responsibilities of those who speak. Painting occupies the midpoint: it draws on what Merleau-Ponty calls the fabric of brute meaning, preconceptual, concrete, innocent of the kind of conceptualization science or philosophy imposes, and yet it presents something the hard materialist cannot entirely look away from. One of us compared it to the breath in meditation, that rare meeting point of the conscious and unconscious, where the thing-in-here and the thing-out-there touch without either disappearing. The painter, in this account, is not making a representation of a world. Things of the world give birth to the painter, by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible.

Depth became the central problem, and it was a productive one. Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that depth is not a dimension like height or width. It is not something we read off the world the way we read the Cartesian grid. It is the first dimension in the sense that it precedes and constitutes the others, the dimension that only exists for a locus, for a body that moves through the world, accumulates experience, carries the other side of the apple even when looking at one side. What I call depth, he writes, is either nothing or it is my participation in a being without restriction. This is what the Renaissance perspectivalists missed, and what they suppressed: they tried to mathematize depth, to make it a property of objects and their spatial relations, and in doing so they subtracted the body from seeing. The perspectivalists even went so far as to expurgate Euclid’s eighth theorem from their translations, the one that was inconvenient for their program. Painters, Merleau-Ponty insists, always knew better. No technique of perspective is an exact solution, and there is no projection of the existing world which respects it in all aspects. Something escapes. That something is the body.

The mirror section of the essay surfaced a version of this we hadn’t quite expected. The mirror emerges because I am a visible seer, he writes, because there is a reflexivity of the sensible. The mirror’s phantom draws my flesh into the outer world. And we spent time with the cascade of paintings-of-painters-painting that Merleau-Ponty points to, painters catching themselves in the act of catching the world. A hand drawing a hand. We noted that this remains a genuinely strange object, that it hasn’t gotten less vertiginous with familiarity. There is something here that really is different, not just a question of artistic balance between the ethereal and the concrete, but something structurally peculiar about the act of depicting the thing that sees. Memory came up in this section too: the word appears only once in the whole essay, which felt odd given how much weight it carries. We know the other side of the apple because we remember having seen other apples, and other sides of this one. In that sense, painting is us wanting to remind our future selves that there was a past way of seeing, a record not of what was there but of how it was encountered.

Rodin’s remark about the photograph came near the end, and it clarified something the whole conversation had been building toward. Instantaneous glimpses, unstable attitudes petrify movement, he said. A photograph of a horse mid-gallop, captured at the exact moment its legs are tucked beneath its body, gives us no sense of a horse running. We feel it as wrong, static, even grotesque. But a painting of a horse with legs splayed in every direction, technically impossible, reads immediately as movement. We could not thaw the frozen horse out by multiplying the glimpses. The painter is not trying to capture what is there. The painter is trying to capture what is not yet there, what is already gone, the secret ciphers of motion that live in the gap between moments. Resemblance, Merleau-Ponty writes, is the result of perception, not its basis. The photograph aims at what is there and lies. The painter reaches toward what is absent and tells the truth.

This is what Merleau-Ponty means, we thought, when he quotes Cézanne’s phrase: the painter thinks in painting. Not thinks about painting, not thinks while painting, but thinks through the vision-becoming-gesture that the act of painting is. Vision is not the metamorphosis of things themselves into the sight of them, he writes. It is a thinking that unequivocally decodes signs given within the body. The painter does not translate an inner mental image onto a surface. The painter’s body encounters the world, and the canvas is where that encounter makes itself legible. We kept coming back to the photograph-of-someone-mid-speech, the one that looks wrong even though it is technically accurate, the one we want to cast into the flames. It looks wrong because we do not encounter people as frozen instances. We encounter them as composited motion, as bodies always with a foot in each instant. The painting can hold that. The photograph cannot, no matter how many frames per second you add.

We arrived, toward the end, at a question that felt like it had been waiting the whole time: what does this mean for how we live now? The Midjourney prompt as artwork was raised, and we turned it over. The argument that emerged was not simply that AI-generated images are worse, but that they participate in a different process entirely. A prompt is already a cognitive-linguistic act. The image that comes back is not the painter’s sensory-motor encounter with the world, condensed and re-expressed through the body in the act of painting. It is a representation of a cognitive description, twice removed from the carnal. Whether or not it happens to be beautiful, it does not arise from the same place. Merleau-Ponty would say no, because the painting is an analog or likeness only according to the body. And we could feel the weight of that claim, not as a nostalgic defense of traditional media, but as a diagnosis of something being lost when we mistake the map for the territory, and then start producing maps of maps.

The syllabus ahead includes Benjamin and Sontag and their accounts of photography and mechanical reproduction, and by the end of the session it felt clear why we needed this foundation first. Dewey gave us the urgency of aesthetic experience as a stake in civilization. Merleau-Ponty has now given us the phenomenological mechanics, the body as the irreducible site where world and self fold into each other, where depth is not a property of space but a quality of persistence. Applying utilitarian or consequentialist metrics to this realm is not merely inadequate, it is actively obstructive, it forecloses the very territory it claims to measure. The Dow being up is not, as one of us put it, the Dao being up. And we knew what we meant.